BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Library of Congress -- Exhibit (Graphic Arts): World War I: American Artists View the Great War

DC -- Library of Congress -- Exhibit (Graphic Arts): World War I: American Artists View the Great War:

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Description of Pictures: World War I: American Artists View the Great War
May 7, 2016–May 6, 2017
Heeding the call from artist Charles Dana Gibson to “Draw ‘til it hurts,” hundreds of leading American artists galvanized public interest in the Great War (1914–1918). Although the United States participated as a direct combatant in World War I from 1917 to 1918, the riveting posters, cartoons, fine art prints, and drawings on display chronicle this massive international conflict from its onset through its aftermath.
There will be two completely different presentations of this exhibition at the Library of Congress. The first will be on view from May 7, 2016, through October 22, 2016, and the second presentation will be on view from October 31, 2016, through May 6, 2017. However, this online version of the exhibition reflects all of the art that appears in the Graphic Arts Gallery during the year.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. LOCWWI_170107_004.JPG: World War I American Artists View the Great War Heeding the call from artist Charles Dana Gibson to "Draw 'til it hurts," hundreds of leading American artists galvanized public interest in the Great War (1914–1918). Although the United States participated as a direct combatant in World War I from 1917 to 1918, the riveting posters, cartoons, fine art prints, and drawings on display chronicle this massive international conflict from its onset through its aftermath. Gibson, a preeminent illustrator, led the federal government's Division of Pictorial Publicity, a unit of the Committee on Public Information. The Division focused on promoting recruitment, bond drives, home front service, troop support, and camp libraries. Many images advocated for American involvement in the war and others encouraged hatred of the German enemy. In less than two years, the Division's 300 artists produced more than 1,400 designs, including some 700 posters. The works chosen for this exhibition reflect the focus of wartime art on patriotic and propaganda messages -- by government-supported as well as independent and commercial artists. They include James Montgomery Flagg (best known for his portrayal of Uncle Sam), Wladyslaw Benda, George Bellows, Joseph Pennell, and William Allen Rogers. In contrast, such artists as Maurice Becker, Kerr Eby, and Samuel J. Woolf, drew on their personal experiences to depict military scenes on the front lines as well as the traumatic treatment of conscientious objectors. And finally, cartoonists offered both scathing criticism and gentle humor, as shown in Bud Fisher's comic strip Mutt and Jeff. Photography also provided essential communication during the First World War. The selected images detail the service of soldiers, nurses, journalists, and factory workers from the home front to the trenches. American Red Cross photographs by Lewis Hine and others employ artful documentation to capture the challenges of recovery and rebuilding in Europe after the devastation of war.
2. LOCWWI_170107_012.JPG: James Montgomery Flagg's Iconic Uncle Sam Drawing on the quintessential American symbol of Uncle Sam that first became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, James Montgomery Flagg introduced his iconic version of the elderly gentleman on the July 6, 1916, cover of Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Newspaper. Flagg used the image again on a 1917 I Want You for U.S. Army recruitment poster. It became one of the most famous posters ever printed, and Flagg's popular image was again employed for recruiting purposes during World War II. The Library preserves original, full-size posters from both world wars. This alternative version, aimed at potential U.S. Navy recruits, was designed for display on street cars, buses, and subway cars.
3. LOCWWI_170107_024.JPG: Frances Adams Halsted (designer) and Vincente Aderente (painter) Create Columbia Calls Convinced that war with Germany was inevitable, Frances Adams Halsted wrote her poem, Columbia Calls, in 1916. After America entered the war on April 6, 1917, Halsted donated both her poem and accompanying image design to the U.S. War Department. Three months later, the New York Times announced plans to print 500,000 copies as a poster, intending to use the proceeds to establish a home for orphaned children of American soldiers and sailors. Painter Vincent Aderente, who executed Halsted's design, had emigrated from Italy at age six, studied at the Art Students League in New York City, and served as an assistant to muralist Edwin Howland Blashfield.
4. LOCWWI_170107_029.JPG: Charles Dana Gibson Advocates for Intervention By posing his title as a question, Charles Dana Gibson expresses his frustration with Uncle Sam's lack of action as he watches a German soldier harass a mother and child in mourning. While President Woodrow Wilson pondered the nation's entry into the war, Gibson published this cartoon advocating U.S. intervention as a double page spread in Life magazine three months before the U.S. Congress formally declared war against Germany. Gibson drew attention to German mistreatment of civilians in powerful political cartoons created before and during the time he led the Division of Pictorial Publicity, a government body that recruited top illustrators to contribute to the nation's war effort.
5. LOCWWI_170107_053.JPG: John E. Sheridan Promotes Literacy The United War Work Campaign set out to raise $170 million in the final week of the war from November 11–18, 1918. Of the seven participating service organizations that collected money for war work at home and abroad, the American Library Association focused its fundraising on supplying books and magazines to the soldiers. This spirited poster was created by John E. Sheridan who attended Georgetown College and designed a number of posters promoting athletic events at his own, as well as other colleges and universities before the war.
6. LOCWWI_170107_058.JPG: John Norton's Liberty Bond Poster While Liberty Bond posters often stressed such positive incentives as fulfilling one's patriotic duty, keeping the world safe for democracy, and backing "our boys" -- others sought to motivate through fear and loathing of the enemy. Here, John Norton deployed a simple, effective composition. Seen at ground level, blood-drenched boots bearing the German Reichsadler (Imperial Eagle) fuse with the title message to suggest the threat of invasion. While the war never reached American soil, this and other Fourth Liberty Loan campaign posters were instrumental in raising some seven billion dollars.
7. LOCWWI_170107_073.JPG: Joseph Pennell's Machinery of War Joseph Pennell's wartime drawings and prints continued his lifelong fascination with industrial subjects -- a theme he called the "Wonder of Work." Pennell was granted special access to such sensitive sites as shipyards and munitions factories and the backs of his drawings often bear censor clearance stamps. As a Quaker who was opposed to war, Pennell's ambivalence comes through in his comment: ". . . it is the working of the great machinery in the great mills which I find so inspiring -- so impressive. . . . And if only the engines turned out were engines of peace -- how much better would the world be."
8. LOCWWI_170107_081.JPG: Rollin Kirby's Uncle Sam Goes To Battle As American forces continued to arrive in Europe, the German Army began its spring 1918 offensive, Kaiserschlacht, on four fronts. By depicting Uncle Sam, a symbol of the American people, running toward the Second Battle of Picardy, editorial cartoonist Rollin Kirby encouraged Americans to join the European conflict. The Uncle Sam character had been introduced in the 1830s and was later popularized by cartoonist Thomas Nast. Illustrator James Montgomery Flagg made his grizzled, penetrating visage famous during World War I in his I Want You poster.
9. LOCWWI_170107_096.JPG: George Bellows Imagines German Atrocities In 1918, George Bellows responded to reported German atrocities in Belgium with a series of hard-hitting drawings, lithographs, and paintings. The title, translated as May God Punish England was a German army slogan attributed to poet Ernst Lissauer (1882–1937). Bellows imagined a horrific scene in which German soldiers -- some of whom are shown smiling or laughing -- crucify three men. Bellows' treatment of the subject recalls Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) religious traditions that depict the suffering Christ -- suggesting broader human anguish at the hands of a violent throng.
10. LOCWWI_170107_109.JPG: Kerr Eby's Soldiers Transporting Artillery During the war and his service with the 40th Engineers Artillery Brigade, Kerr Eby made a series of drawings that he called upon for use in later prints. The title here refers to the seventy-five millimeter field artillery guns, also known as the French 75, which are shown being transported by the soldiers in this image.
11. LOCWWI_170107_122.JPG: Helen Johns Kirtland Dons Gas Mask at the Front Most couples would not head into a war zone for their honeymoon, but that is exactly where Helen Johns Kirtland and Lucian Swift Kirtland went in 1917. Already an established photographer, Mrs. Kirtland worked for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly and the YMCA during World War I. While she covered the same topics as her male colleagues, she paid particular attention to the contributions of female war workers. An unknown photographer captured her standing in a trench at the front on a winter day.
12. LOCWWI_170107_127.JPG: Keystone View Company's Commentary on Gas Attacks This haunting photograph conveys the deadly means by which men methodically killed each other along the front during World War I. Despite the Hague Convention limitations on the use of poisonous gas in 1899 and 1907, both the Germans and the Allies used it. Looking back in 1923, the Keystone View Company comments on the back of this image, ". . . the Allies eventually excelled the Germans in the amounts and deadly quality of the gases used." Ultimately, the greatest number of soldiers who suffered from gas were Russians on the Eastern Front.
13. LOCWWI_170107_146.JPG: McKee Barclay's Personification of Poisonous Gas Reacting to the illegal use of poisonous gas as a weapon, Baltimore cartoonist Barclay McKee drew this ghastly image of Mars, the god of war, as a skeleton wearing a pith helmet and breathing deadly vapor from a trench. Barclay worked as an editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun from 1908 to 1920.
14. LOCWWI_170107_153.JPG: Samuel Woolf's Eyewitness Drawing Samuel J. Woolf worked as a visual war correspondent at the front in Beaumont-Hamel, France. He made compelling eyewitness drawings in the contested villages of the province of Lorraine, a region sought for decades by both the Germans and the French. The Germans attacked the inexperienced American Expeditionary Forces during the Battle of Seicheprey, flattening surrounding villages -- including Rambucourt -- and inflicting large numbers of casualties. Woolf had studied at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design, before heading to the front.
15. LOCWWI_170107_160.JPG: Ralph Osborne's Air war Photograph Award-winning Boston photographer Ralph Osborne manipulated this image of a battle between German and American planes in the air, but with its illuminated clouds, this photograph stands as a work of art. Renowned for his "superposition" in the printing of his images, Osborne participated in group shows of the Boston Young Men's Christian Union Camera Club and the Guild of Photographers of the Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston.
16. LOCWWI_170107_172.JPG: Edwin Blashfield's Certificate for a Red Cross Nurse Though Blashfield's design shows Columbia "knighting" a kneeling doughboy, this certificate honors the service of Red Cross nurse Anna Cecilia Foldesi. Shortly after arriving at Iowa's Camp Dodge, Foldesi (name misspelled as Foldese on the certificate) died of influenza and pneumonia on November 8th, days before the war ended. Millions more died from the wartime influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 than from enemy weapons. This family portrait shows, from top to bottom, Anna Cecilia with three of her sisters -- Marie, Matilda, and Rose. Both Marie and Matilda were also nurses.
17. LOCWWI_170107_188.JPG: Women's Branch of the Army's Industrial Service Section During World War I, millions of women contributed to the war effort, not only through volunteer service but by entering the labor force as nurses, agricultural laborers and factory workers. Here, a woman works in the converted Baldwin Locomotive property in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River south of Philadelphia. After April 1918, 3,000 women participated in a work force of 15,000 to manufacture Enfield rifles for British and American troops. In the second photograph, a woman manufactures weapons for the Midvale Steel & Ordnance Company in the Nicetown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The factory had a longstanding contract with the U.S. Navy, and by the end of the war, its workforce had increased to 7,300. Without sufficient men to maintain the war effort, women were needed and the U.S. government encouraged them to work.
18. LOCWWI_170107_199.JPG: William Allen Rogers Pays Tribute to Wartime Nurses A moving vision of wounded soldiers needing care sustains a Red Cross nurse on her storm-tossed voyage to the war front. William Allen Rogers extols the courage and selfless patriotism of nurses in this and other drawings that also specifically reference the dangers they faced in German attacks on hospital ships. He may have created this image for a poster as notes on the back of the drawing state it was "sent to [the] American Red Cross Second War Fund." Known primarily for his scenes of the American West, Rogers focused on cartooning after 1900 and created poster designs during World War I.
19. LOCWWI_170107_209.JPG: Roy Hull Still Enlists the Help of Stenographers In the shadow of the U.S. Capitol building, a soldier shares the stage with a stenographer, both essential cogs in the war effort. The United States needed more than soldiers to fight the war, issuing repeated calls for secretaries and stenographers. Another example in the Library's World War I poster collection claims a shortage of 5,000 stenographers and offers a yearly salary of $1,100. Nearly sixty years after the war ended, the female stenographers who worked with the American Expeditionary Forces in France were granted veteran status by a 1977 act of Congress.
20. LOCWWI_170107_222.JPG: Bud Fisher Comments on Freedom On a wager that he could not "stick it out," Bud Fisher trained as an American soldier during World War I. However, the Army prohibited him from producing his profitable comic strip, so he joined the Canadian forces. He served in London, working as a censor while continuing to draw his popular feature, Mutt and Jeff. Wanting to promote the war effort, Fisher had his characters enlist, although the comic strip rarely featured the war front. In the first cartoon shown, he focuses his wartime humor on a hapless knitter. In the second, during a humorous conversation about liberty bonds, Jeff tells Mutt that his divorce decree gave him freedom.
21. LOCWWI_170107_227.JPG: Everybody is getting a Liberty Bond now! They're great things for the country, aren't they, Jeff, these Liberty Bonds? Now you've made a statement!
22. LOCWWI_170107_233.JPG: I tell you, if everybody in these United States would get one, the fighting would soon be over and we'd have peace. Everybody should have a bond for the good of the country. Them's my sentiments exactly! It's too bad they're so hard to get though!
23. LOCWWI_170107_237.JPG: "Hard to get," me [sic] eye! Any one who wants to loosen up and held their country by getting one don't have a darn bit of trouble getting it. Well, things must have changed since I got mine ten years ago then!
24. LOCWWI_170107_241.JPG: Say, simple! You couldn't get a Liberty Bond more than a few weeks ago! I don't believe you even know what one is. I don't hey?
25. LOCWWI_170107_250.JPG: Well, if that ain't a Liberty Bond, I'll eat it! Where's yours? [As he holds up his divorce decree.]
26. LOCWWI_170107_257.JPG: Otakar Valasek Depicts Austro-Hungarian Suffering Otakar Valasek, a Chicago-based Czech cartoonist, used his experience living under Austro-Hungarian rule to illuminate the plight of those suffering during the war. Here he shows people of various ethnicities who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire shackled to the oppressive Magyar masters who are themselves under the ultimate control of the giant, looming figure of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II. In April 1918, Valasek left the Chicago Herald to join the staff of the Committee on Public Information for the duration of the War.
27. LOCWWI_170107_275.JPG: Gordon Grant's Jobs for Fighters Poster The Bureau for Returning Soldiers and Sailors endeavored to match employers with those in need of work after the war, be they former soldiers or war workers. Gordon Grant was a captain in the U.S. Army when he designed this poster. Because of a foot disability, he did not go overseas during the war but served in the Morale Branch of the General Staff in Washington, D.C. Before World War I, Grant worked as a correspondent and illustrator for Harper's Weekly where he travelled to South Africa to document the Boer War. After World War I, he worked mainly as a marine artist, depicting ships and seafaring scenes.
28. LOCWWI_170107_286.JPG: Maurice Becker, Conscientious Objector Documenting the treatment he felt firsthand as a conscientious objector imprisoned in Leavenworth, Kansas, during World War I, Becker worked through his trauma in a series of charcoal drawings after his release. Although more than 64,000 men initially registered as conscientious objectors, only 450 of the most recalcitrant -- both for religious and political reasons -- were incarcerated in the Fort Leavenworth U.S. Disciplinary Barracks. Some were not released until 1919 and 1920. Born in Russia, Becker immigrated to the United States as a child. He dedicated his career to fighting injustice.
29. LOCWWI_170107_305.JPG: Kerr Eby's Refugees While serving on the war front in France for the U.S. Army, Kerr Eby made drawings which became the basis for later prints. Here, displaced refugees trudge past a line of soldiers. Refugees appeared in Eby's 1936 book War in which he wrote: "I am not a pacifist if it means not to see the necessity of an army and navy in this world as it is and not to thank God for them. . . . There was great beauty in the last war as there is always beauty in human giving, but the beauty was in the giver not in the thing itself."
30. LOCWWI_170107_317.JPG: Lewis Hine Photographs Veteran Rehabilitation Lewis Hine, while working for the American Red Cross, created this beautifully-composed photograph that shows a patient making a knotted-cord belt at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts. After the war, the American Red Cross continued to provide support services that included psychiatric care and rehabilitation for disabled veterans.
31. LOCWWI_170107_325.JPG: American Red Cross Witnesses Recorvery Efforts The American Red Cross documented the Chinese Labour Corps who were among the approximately 450,000 workers recruited from the Republic of China, Indo-China, Egypt, India, and other developing nations in 1917. The British and French armies sought manpower to dig trenches, fill sandbags, maintain roads, and repair tanks. After the war, some stayed to fill in the trenches, remove unexploded bombs and mines, help in the removal of the dead, and other thankless tasks. By 1921, most workers were repatriated to their countries.
32. LOCWWI_170107_330.JPG: American Red Cross Documents the Need for Reconstruction With an estimated one million casualties, the Battle of Verdun from February 21 to December 18, 1916, was the war's longest and one of its deadliest campaigns. This post-war view of the town offers a glimpse both of the devastation and the efforts to rebuild and recover. American optimism and energy played a role in rebuilding Europe and providing nutrition to war-torn France. Despite the organization's insistence that hotels were ready for occupation, the buttresses supporting these buildings two years after the war ended, hinted that Europe was still in need of major reconstruction.
33. LOCWWI_170107_340.JPG: American Red Cross Captures the War's Devastation During French Commander-in-Chief Robert Nivelle's attempt to push back the German line in April 1917, the Napoleonic-era edifice of the Cath�drale Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Vaast d'Arras was destroyed. This photo -- part of American Red Cross documentation of the war's aftermath -- captures the extent of the damage caused when the roof collapsed, destroying most of the nave and transept. Not everyone decried it as an architectural loss. Arthur Stanley Riggs wrote, "As we stood looking at the cathedral one brilliant morning, and marveling at the unique change shell-fire had made -- in this case transforming one of the ugliest Renaissance churches in France into a sublime and inspiring ecclesiastical ruin. . . ."
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